Datong Ancient Town sits about thirty kilometers from central Tongling, a Ming and Qing dynasty river settlement whose commercial streets and dock architecture have survived the wholesale demolition that erased comparable towns across the Yangtze corridor. The town grew as a trading post on a tributary of the Yangtze, and the buildings along its main street were built by merchants conducting the river trade in salt, grain, and goods from the interior.
The streetscape preserves a row of two-story timber-framed shops with overhanging upper floors, their ground levels once open as commercial fronts and now mostly converted to small businesses and tea houses that have kept the proportions intact. The dock area retains stone embankments and the foundations of warehouses that handled river cargo for several centuries. Datong sees relatively few visitors by Chinese heritage town standards, which means the commercial pressure that has transformed similar towns — filling them with identical souvenir shops and performance venues — has not yet overwhelmed the original character. It deserves a half-day from Tongling or a stop en route if traveling south toward Jiuhua Mountain.